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Abstract

Microstructured fibres which consist of a circular step index core and a liquid crystal inclusion running parallel to this core are investigated. The attenuation and electro-optic effects of light coupled into the core are measured. Coupled mode theory is used to study the interaction of core modes with the liquid crystal inclusion. The experimental and theoretical results show that these fibres can exhibit attenuation below 0.16 dB cm−1 in off-resonant wavelength regions and still have significant electro-optic effects which can lead to a polarisation extinction of 6 dB cm−1.

Figures (9)

Fig. 1 Schematic cross sections of microstructured fibres: (a) Hollow core PCF, (b) solid core and (c) fibre design discussed in this paper. Λdenotes the pitch in (a) and (b) and the center-center-distance in (c). dincl denotes the inclusion diameter in (a)- (c) and dcore the core diameter in (c). (d) Overview of the possible combinations of different types of PCFs and LCs and the resulting guiding principles.

Fig. 3 (a) Experimentally determined attenuation spectrum (red solid line, □) and the predicted attenuation by CMT (black line, ∎) of fibre I filled with MLC2103. The blue lines correspond to the effective refractive indices of core (▼) and inclusion (▲) HE11 modes calculated with FEM. (b) The three patterns show the calculated square of the transverse electric fields of the normal modes labelled in (a) (marked with green dashed lines). The Ge-doped core is on the left and the liquid crystal inclusion on the right side in each image.

Fig. 4 Plot of the relative power for fibre I filled with MLC2103 for the x- (blue line, □) and the y-polarisation (orange line, ○) with an applied voltage of 500 V at 1 kHz. The inset in the upper left corner shows a schematic of the electrooptic cell with labelled axes and the direction of the applied electric field E.

Fig. 5 (a) The upper graph shows the effective refractive indices of the HE11 core mode (black) and the inclusion modes HE31 (magenta) and HE21 (green) for fibre I filled with BL036. The attenuation (solid) is plotted in the middle for the y-polarisation and at the bottom for the x-polarisation. The dashed curves in the latter two plots correspond to the attenuation determined by coupled mode theory. (b) The mode intensity patterns of the HE31 and HE21 modes at 500 nm, both are twofold degenerate. The arrows indicate the direction of the transversal electric field.

Fig. 6 Plot of the relative power for fibre I filled with BL036 for the x- (green, ▲) and the y- polarisation (red, ▼) with an applied voltage of 500 V at 1 kHz. The blue curve (∎) shows the polarisation extinction at 500V.